Communications-intensive workstations

The introduction of gigabit local area networks and the resultant proliferation of multimedia applications will require fundamental changes in the design of computer workstations. The workstation is implemented as a distributed application on a local area network in order to focus on communications issues. A single processor is dedicated to the low-level functions of acquiring image and audio streams from the network and sending keyboard and mouse information to the network. The display processor receives only bitmap images of data to be displayed. Higher level functionality, like that provided by the X-window system, is handled by other processors in the network. To demonstrate the feasibility of this architecture, a prototype monochrome (bilevel black and white) workstation was built that is able to simultaneously display several windows with 30 frame/s video, each arriving from a different processor via a local area interconnect. The feasibility of interleaving real-time video images across multiple disks on different processors to provide sufficient throughput for full-motion video is demonstrated. A simple method provides video and sound which are synchronized with each other and which flow smoothly